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Create a tar archive from files in a directory

Source: R/general_create_tar.R
create_tar.Rd

Creates a tar archive (optionally compressed) containing the specified files from a directory. The function uses the system tar executable and passes the file list via a temporary file, avoiding command-line length limitations when archiving large numbers of files.

Usage

create_tar(
  files,
  dir_source,
  path_tar,
  compress = c("none", "gzip", "bzip2", "xz"),
  chmod = NULL,
  overwrite = FALSE
)

Arguments

files

Character vector of file names relative to dir_source. Must be non-NULL, non-empty, and contain no NA values or absolute paths. All named files must exist and be non-empty within dir_source.

dir_source

Character scalar. Directory containing the files to archive. The parent directory of path_tar is created if it does not exist.

path_tar

Character scalar. Path to the output tar archive.

compress

Character scalar controlling compression. One of "none" (default, plain .tar), "gzip" (.tar.gz), "bzip2" (.tar.bz2), or "xz" (.tar.xz). The archive extension is not checked against this choice; the caller is responsible for using a consistent file name.

chmod

Character scalar. Optional Unix file permissions to set on the created archive, as a three-digit octal string (e.g. "644"). If NULL (the default) permissions are determined by the system. Values outside the range "000"-"777" are rejected.

overwrite

Logical scalar. Should an existing archive at path_tar be overwritten? Defaults to FALSE.

Value

Invisibly returns path_tar.

Details

The function requires a tar executable to be available on the system PATH. File names in files must be relative to dir_source; absolute paths are not supported.

Compression support depends on the tar implementation and the presence of the corresponding compressor (gzip, bzip2, or xz) on the system.

Author

Ahmed El-Gabbas

Examples

ecokit::load_packages(fs, archive, purrr, dplyr)

# Create non-empty example files in a temporary directory
tmp <- fs::path_temp("example_files")
fs::dir_create(tmp)
files <- c("a.qs2", "b.qs2", "c.qs2")
purrr::walk(file.path(tmp, files), .f = ~ writeLines("test content", .x))

# Create an uncompressed tar archive
tar_file <- fs::path(tmp, "archive.tar")
create_tar(
  files = files, dir_source = tmp, path_tar = tar_file, overwrite = TRUE)

# Verify the created archive
archive::archive(tar_file)
#> # A tibble: 3 × 3
#>   path   size date               
#>   <chr> <int> <dttm>             
#> 1 a.qs2    13 2026-06-24 02:17:10
#> 2 b.qs2    13 2026-06-24 02:17:10
#> 3 c.qs2    13 2026-06-24 02:17:10

ecokit::file_type(tar_file)
#> [1] "POSIX tar archive (GNU)"

# Create a gzip-compressed archive
tar_gz_file <- fs::path(tmp, "archive.tar.gz")
create_tar(
  files = files, dir_source = tmp, path_tar = tar_gz_file,
  compress = "gzip", overwrite = TRUE)

# Compare the two archives
fs::file_info(c(tar_file, tar_gz_file)) %>%
 dplyr::select(path, size, type)
#> # A tibble: 2 × 3
#>   path                                                size type 
#>   <fs::path>                                   <fs::bytes> <fct>
#> 1 /tmp/RtmpCSqJ96/example_files/archive.tar            10K file 
#> 2 /tmp/RtmpCSqJ96/example_files/archive.tar.gz         149 file